This volume is themed around the interdependent relationship between humans and the environment, an important topic in the work of Corrie Bakels. How do environmental constraints and opportunities influence human behaviour and what is the human impact on the ecology and appearance of the landscape? And what can archaeological knowledge contribute to the current discussions about the use, arrangement and depletion of our (local) environment?

This textbook explores the growing area of human-environment interaction. We live in the Anthropocene, an era dominated by humans, but also by the positive yet destructive environmental feedbacks that are poised to completely reset the relationships between nature and society. Modern and historic political, social, and cultural processes and physical landscape responses determine the intensity of these impacts. Yet different cultural groups, political and economic entities view, react to, and impact these human-environmental processes in spatially distinct and divergent ways. Providing an accessible, up-to-date, approach to human-environment interactions with balanced coverage of both social and natural science approaches to core environmental issues, this textbook is an integrative, multi-disciplinary offering that discusses environmental issues and processes within the context of human societies. The book begins by addressing the three most pressing issues of our time: climate change, threshold exceedance, and the 6th mass extinction. From there the authors identify within chapters on resources, population, agriculture and urbanization what precipitated and continues to sustain these three issues. They end with a chapter outlining some practical solutions to our human-environment crises. The book will be a valuable resource for interdisciplinary environment related courses bridging the gap between the social and natural sciences, human geographies and physical geographies.

Drawing on research from eleven countries across four continents, the 16 chapters in the volume bring perspectives from various specialties in anthropology and human ecology, institutional analysis, historical and political ecology, geography, archaeology, and land change sciences. The four sections of the volume reflect complementary approaches to HEI: health and adaptation approaches, land change and landscape management approaches, institutional and political-ecology approaches, and historical and archaeological approaches.

This fresh and innovative approach to human-environmental relations will revolutionise our understanding of the boundaries between ourselves and the environment we inhabit. The anthology is predicated on the notion that values shift back and forth between humans and the world around them in an ethical communicative zone called ‘value-space’. The contributors examine the transformative interplay between external environments and human values, and identify concrete ways in which these norms, residing in and derived from self and society, are projected onto the environment.

The impacts of climate change on human societies, and the roles those societies themselves play in altering their environments, appear in headlines more and more as concern over modern global climate change intensifies. Increasingly, archaeologists and paleoenvironmental scientists are looking to evidence from the human past to shed light on the processes which link environmental and cultural change. Establishing clear contemporaneity and correlation, and then moving beyond correlation to causation, remains as much a theoretical task as a methodological one. This book addresses this challenge by exploring new approaches to human-environment dynamics and confronting the key task of constructing arguments that can link the two in concrete and detailed ways. The contributors include researchers working in a wide variety of regions and time periods, including Mesoamerica, Mongolia, East Africa, the Amazon Basin, and the Island Pacific, among others. Using methodological vignettes from their own research, the contributors explore diverse approaches to human-environment dynamics, illustrating the manifold nature of the subject and suggesting a wide variety of strategies for approaching it. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in Archaeology, Paleoenvironmental Science, Ecology, and Geology.

This introductory level text explores various theoretical approaches to human-environment geography, demonstrating how local dynamics and global processes influence how we interact with our environments. Introduces students to fundamental concepts in environmental geography and science Explores the core theoretical traditions within the field, along with major thematic issues such as population, food and agriculture, and water resources Offers an engaging and unique view of the spatial relationships between humans and their environment across geographical locations around the world Includes a variety of real-world policy questions and emphasizes geography’s strong tradition of field work by featuring prominent nature-society geographers in guest field notes

Environmental Social Science offers a new synthesis of environmental studies, defining the nature of human-environment interactions and providing the foundation for a new cross-disciplinary enterprise that will make critical theories and research methods accessible across the natural and social sciences. Makes key theories and methods of the social sciences available to biologists and other environmental scientists Explains biological theories and concepts for the social sciences community working on the environment Helps bridge one of the difficult divides in collaborative work in human-environment research Includes much-needed descriptions of how to carry out research that is multinational, multiscale, multitemporal, and multidisciplinary within a complex systems theory context